In the following essay, Houghton analyzes Atwood's attempt to construct meaning by drawing attention to and highlighting the “process of exclusion in everyday experience, by focusing upon the inadequacies and illusions of overt fabrications.”

Margaret Atwood's presentation of a public self remains enigmatic, elusive and contradictory. She self-consciously refuses all the diverse personas that have been foisted upon her, working hard at escaping the net of our expectations. Her interviews are fascinating moments of flight and of flux. In part this unapproachability can be attributed to her legitimate desire for privacy and the preservation of some sense of private self, but there are other very important motives.

There can be few women writers so aware of the dangers of form, both personal and literary. In our never ending attempts to...